Is There a Connection Between Violence Against Women and Academic Performance?

Using data to promote the health of victims and support their academic progress

Sexual violence and intimate partner violence have garnered national attention during the past few years. Although college-aged women are highly vulnerable to violence, there is little research on the relationship between violence and academic progress.

Xiaoqian Liu and Colleen Sanders proposed a comprehensive way to measure academic performance by collecting data from emergency rooms, a student enrollment system and a course evaluation website. In addition to traditional regression and classification methods, they applied distance metric learning methods to discovering a set of evaluation metrics of academic progress and testing hypotheses on the impact of abuse history and health care utilization.

Furthermore, Liu and Sanders aimed to automatically extract geo-temporal information relevant with sexual assaults from text documents, such as online news reports and emergency records. Findings will assist the development of evidence-based policies to promote the physical, psychological and social health of victims and foster their academic progress.

Xiaoqian Liu is a second-year MS student in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering. Her research interests are machine learning and text mining.